A Family of Strangers

by Emilie Richards

  Five minutes later she was as surprised as I’d expected, opening the passenger door and peering inside immediately. “Are you okay? The girls?”

  “I need to talk to you. Please get in.”

  “But I’m parked—”

  “I know. I saw you drive up. I’ll take you back to your car when we’re done.”

  She frowned. “I’m not really dressed for—”

  “We’re just going to walk. Please get in.”

  She frowned, but she lowered herself to the seat and slammed the door, grabbing for her seat belt. “This must be about Wendy. Is she—”

  I cut her off. “I haven’t heard anything new, but yes, it’s about Wendy. It’s about you. It’s about me. We’re going over to Glade Springs Park, unless you have some major objection.”

  She didn’t answer, so I didn’t change course. Neither of us spoke until I had parked my Civic at the end of a row and gotten out. As Mom emerged, I opened the back door and got out Diana Gordon’s yearbook and slid it under my arm. I met her on the sidewalk. She glanced at the yearbook, then focused her eyes straight ahead.

  I started walking. “I thought we’d take the path along the lake. It’s shady, and long enough for this conversation.”

  “You have certainly piqued my curiosity. You seem angry.”

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  I started down the sidewalk, choosing the lake fork once we reached the path. The morning was gray and cool, the air scented with the possibility of rain later in the morning. Not a lot of people were in sight, although the ten-thousand-steps crowd would probably arrive when the skies cleared.

  “You need to slow down,” my mother said after a few minutes.

  I didn’t realize how fast I’d been walking. I stood and waited for her to catch up. My mother looked tired today, and even though, as usual, she had taken the time to apply makeup and add a long silver chain over her cotton sweater, both seemed haphazard. Despite my sense of betrayal, I felt a pang of sympathy for her. She had a lot on her plate. Dad, Wendy, and now, having to deal with mysterious me.

  I wondered if the weight of all these problems reminded her of the day my sister had announced she was going to have a baby. Had Mom and Dad learned of the pregnancy before Wendy graduated? Lying in bed last night after looking up my father on the internet, I’d done the math. I had been born in January—unless that, too, was a lie—and I had been two months premature. Give or take a week, most likely I was conceived right before or after Wendy donned her cap and gown.

  I started down the path again, but slower. “I was given this yearbook by Claire Durant. She’s the assistant principal at Seabank High. You mentioned her recently.”

  “I had forgotten her name.”

  “I thought it might help to know Wendy a little better. I thought Claire might have some insights.”

  “I can’t imagine how Wendy’s life as a teenager could have any bearing on her decision not to come home.”

  “Investigating means turning over every stone. And this time? Well, under the Claire Durant stone, I hit pay dirt.”

  “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

  I glanced at her, and I had a strong feeling she did know. “I saw the picture of Wendy in L’il Abner. Interesting, isn’t it, that nothing about Wendy’s big moment of glory made it into her scrapbooks.”

  “I don’t think I finished them. I guess I got tired...”

  “I guess you got careful. Because anybody looking at the photo of her costar in the play, and then at me, would know that Sean Riley is my father. And after that, they would make the leap that, since it’s doubtful you and Sean had an affair, Wendy must be my mother.”

  Mom was silent, and we walked a few minutes until we approached a bench by the water. She touched my arm. “I need to sit.”

  Anger was bubbling inside me, but not enough to refuse. I perched on the edge of the seat and turned to the page with Sean’s full-length photo. Then I rested the yearbook on her lap. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. Denial? Explanation? Tears? What I wasn’t expecting was silence.

  “I’ve had this conversation with you a million times, but only in my head,” she said at last, closing the book without even looking at it. She set it beside her. “None of them went well. I could never figure out how to tell you how all this happened.”

  “That’s where you went wrong, trying to make the story palatable. Just try the truth. No icing, no sprinkles. Just the plain, simple truth.”

  “It’s figuring out where to start that stops me every time. Do I tell you how amazed I am that such a terrible time in our lives turned out to be such a joy? Do I admit that your father and I threatened to banish Wendy from our lives forever if she didn’t go through with the pregnancy?”

  “She wanted an abortion?” I wasn’t surprised. While my parents are march-through-the-streets pro-lifers, I am pro-choice. I have no idea what Wendy’s stance is, but had I been Wendy, seventeen years old with college and a whole new life ahead of me, I would have considered abortion, too.

  Of course, I was glad she hadn’t gone through with it, even if my parents’ strong opinions had been the only reason. Because here I was, dealing with the aftermath, but sitting here. Alive.

  Mom finally answered my question. “Your sister didn’t know what she wanted, Ryan. Wendy wasn’t used to bad luck. And that’s how she saw the pregnancy. She gambled and lost, and she couldn’t believe it. An abortion was the easy way out. And maybe she was too used to easy. Maybe we’d made her too used to it.”

  “What about Sean Riley?”

  “Wendy refused to tell us who the father was. We really had no idea until you began to grow into that young man’s spitting image.”

  “So you moved across town and sent me to Catholic school so nobody else would see the resemblance?”

  “That was part of it, yes. But not all. I wanted you in a school that was safer than Seabank High, somewhere values would be an everyday part of your education, the way they hadn’t been for your sister.”

  “It’s a joke to think that sitting through Mass every morning does much to tamp down hormones. Girls at our school got pregnant, too.”

  “I was willing to try.”

  I couldn’t throw that back at her. I’d loved my school. The faculty, nuns and laypeople alike, had challenged me on every level. They’d helped me see I could be anybody I wanted. They’d helped me emerge from Wendy’s shadow because they hadn’t known her.

  I changed the subject. “Sean Riley is dead. Did you know that?”

  Mom cleared her throat. I glanced at her, and she looked away. “The Gulf War. So few casualties, really, but yes, Sean was one of them.”

  I’d learned the news last night on Google. How could I mourn a young man I’d never met? He’d been a sperm to Wendy’s egg, nothing more. But still, I had cried more than a few tears. The opportunity to meet my biological father had exploded right along with the land mine that had killed him.

  “His family is large, and they aren’t wealthy,” she went on. “He was a smart boy, handsome as all get out, and he could sing like a Broadway star. I heard he won scholarships, but the money didn’t stretch far enough. So he enlisted. He was counting on the GI Bill when he got out.”

  “He gambled and lost.”

  “After he died I had no proof he was your father, but I was beginning to suspect. You weren’t even in preschool, and even then, you looked like him.”

  “Do his parents know about me?”

  “They still live in Seabank, but I could never find the right way to tell them.”

  “That’s sounding familiar.”

  “What if I was wrong? What if Sean wasn’t your father? Wendy still refuses to talk about it. What if I got the Rileys’ hopes up or worse, what if my revelation ruined the way they saw their son? In their eyes he’s probably a hero. An
d then there was you, and yes, Wendy. The truth would have gotten out, and both of you would have been forced to live with the result.”

  I was in no mood to agree with her. “Why don’t you start back at the beginning?”

  She took a deep breath. “By the time she was a senior, your sister was hard to control. She was sure she knew exactly what she should do and with whom. The fights were wearing. And when we didn’t agree with her, she found other ways to get whatever she wanted. Of course, other parents were having the same problems. Our situation wasn’t unique.”

  I heard her making excuses for Wendy. “Were she and Sean a couple?”

  “No, that’s why nothing came together for a long time. She went out with one boy, then another. In her class everyone seemed to go out in groups, like pack animals. I thought that was good, that it was less likely she’d find herself in any trouble.”

  “And then, wow, the big prize.”

  She took my hand, which surprised me. “Of course, at first we didn’t see her pregnancy that way, sweetheart. We were devastated. We wanted the best for your sister, and instead she couldn’t start college when her friends did. We had to make up a story. We had to find a way to protect her, and then we had to send her to Mexico to live with old friends for the first six months of the pregnancy. They took her on as their au pair.”

  “She went along with that?”

  A shadow crossed her face. “Wendy knew if she didn’t carry the baby to term, she would no longer be welcome in our house.”

  “How Victorian. You threatened her? Forced her? What were her choices?”

  “When she had sex with Sean Riley, she made her choice. And neither your father nor I could have lived with a different outcome. In the end, she agreed that having the baby and giving it up was the right thing to do. Once we helped her see that nobody would ever know, and that in years to come, she could look back at what was, yes, something of a sacrifice—”

  I couldn’t believe her wording. “Something? Something of a sacrifice?”

  “We raised your sister to believe that life is sacred. How would she have felt if she’d gone through with an abortion? She would have regretted it until her dying day.”

  I was in a peculiar position, of course, since this time, my best interests had been in line with those of my parents. Yet I wondered if Wendy regretted my birth every bit as much as she would have regretted the alternative. Living in a foreign country, taking care of the children of acquaintances, counting down the days until labor began, and then returning with nothing to show for those months of isolation except stretch marks? I couldn’t even imagine it.

  “Finish the story,” I said.

  “We told everyone that Wendy wanted to travel. She’d taken four years of Spanish in school and was fairly proficient. So she told her friends she was going to spend a year in Mexico, traveling with family friends and polishing her language skills.”

  “And people bought this?”

  “Like I told you, she had lots of friends, but none I’d call close. And your sister is so good at making people believe her. By the time she embellished her story, I think her friends were sorry they weren’t going with her.”

  “And then...” I held up my palm. “She was supposed to give me away?”

  She bit her lip. I tried to remember if I’d ever seen her do that. Clearly, this part was going to be hard.

  She moved into it slowly. “My plan was to go down to Mexico for the final trimester. I told everybody we were going to travel together for a few weeks, that once Wendy went off to college, she would be off to new and fabulous things without me. So I packed my suitcases and flew to Mérida, in the Yucatán, where Wendy joined me. It was remote enough we were sure she wouldn’t run into anybody we knew, and they had an excellent hospital and medical care.”

  “And the adoption?”

  “We set that up ahead of time with a Catholic agency.” She gave the tiniest smile. “You were in high demand. Wendy chose your new family from half a dozen possibilities.”

  “Is that supposed to make me happy?”

  She began to flip the cover of the yearbook back and forth, until she realized what she was doing and folded her hands. “We moved into an apartment near the hospital. We’d planned to do some light travel, but she wasn’t feeling well, so we stayed put. And then, just a month after I got there, she went into labor.”

  “The problem baby.”

  “You had problems, yes, far too many problems. You were so tiny, and so terribly sick. The hospital was good, but, in my opinion, no hospital would have been good enough. Unfortunately, you were much too sick to move, so we had to stay in Mérida. You needed surgery right away. And, of course, an adoption was out of the question while we waited to see if you pulled through. After all the trauma around the pregnancy, Wendy was mentally exhausted. She was finished with her part and anxious to go back to the US. So we spoke to the dean of the college where she’d been accepted, and we were told she could attend the second semester.”

  “She went off to college and left you behind?”

  “Your sister distanced herself. From the beginning she realized she wasn’t going to keep you, and she didn’t want to watch you struggle.”

  By now I was beginning to see. “You had already told people back in the States that you’d gone to a doctor in Mexico, found you were not only pregnant but pretty far along.”

  “A change of life baby, yes. And I told them the pregnancy was high risk, so when I came home with empty arms, no one would question it. It was all an excuse for staying long enough to see Wendy’s real pregnancy to conclusion. If things had gone as they should have, after the birth Wendy and I would have seen you safely to your new parents and flown home together.”

  “Why this elaborate charade? Why not just leave me there and call once in a while to see if I made it?”

  “Wendy flew back and started school, and I stayed with you. At first I told myself I had to be there to make sure you got the best care until you were well enough to meet your new family. But even when you started to improve, the couple refused to come to Mexico and see you. Of course that set me wondering how committed they were. Your father flew down whenever he could, and after a month he flew in a pediatric cardiac surgeon for your second surgery. It was touch and go, but finally, after two months, it looked like you really were going to make it.”

  She’d stopped, as if remembering that moment, so I nudged. “And?”

  “And I just couldn’t let you go, Ryan. I finally faced the truth. We could have given our friends any number of excuses why I didn’t come home at the same time your sister did. Instead, right from the start, the story I’d chosen had made it possible to come back with a baby. My baby. From the beginning I’d left that loophole, just in case.”

  “Why? Did you want to wave Wendy’s mistake in her face for the rest of her life?”

  She covered my hand with hers, but briefly. “Ryan, it was much simpler. You see, by that time, you were mine in every way. I’d held you, fed you, talked to you for hours, sung to you. You knew my voice. You knew my touch, my smell. The nurses said you thrived whenever I was with you. Quite simply, I fell in love with you, and then your dad did, too.”

  “You mean my grandfather.”

  “No, Dale Gracey is your dad in every way that matters. And I am your mother.”

  I tried not to be swayed. “And the adoptive family?” I guessed the answer. “They didn’t want a baby with all my problems, did they? And if they didn’t want me, who else would? Was guilt a part of bringing me home? You couldn’t abandon me to a system that might fail me?”

  “Every day I say a prayer of thanks that the adoption fell through. I can’t imagine what kind of people they must have been. But by then I wouldn’t have let them have you, anyway, not even if Jesus Himself had come down to vouch for them.”

  I sat silently
for a while. She was answering my questions, but only as I brought each one to the surface. I had guessed much of this as I had time to reflect through a long, difficult night. But now I dug out another.

  “So how did Wendy feel about you bringing me home as your daughter?” I turned. “And be honest. I need to know.”

  She looked uncomfortable, but she nodded. “Not happy. Between Mexico and the United States there were a lot of legal documents to wade through, and that went on for months, so your sister had to be involved for some time.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “You and Dad are listed as my parents on my birth certificate.”

  “After an adoption, the original birth certificate is amended.”

  “You adopted me?”

  “We wanted to be your real parents, your legal parents. Wendy was more than ready for that part of her life to be over. She didn’t want reminders.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to share you and Dad with a sickly infant, either. She’d had you to herself for her entire life. You doted on her. You were at her beck and call.”

  “I can’t tell you for sure. After we brought you home, Wendy mostly went her own way. Oh, she came home from college occasionally. Sometimes she held you, even played with you or fed you. She would buy you cute little gifts, but she never treated you like you were hers. And she never stayed long. For years she found other places to be, other things to do. Part of that was Seabank, more or less the scene of the crime—”

  “And part was me.” I wondered if knowing I was hers had just been too tough emotionally. Or was I simply an annoyance? After her marriage Wendy had waited a surprisingly length of time to have Holly and Noelle. Had the thought of another pregnancy and childbirth been such a horror? Had she only succumbed because Bryce had insisted, and she hadn’t wanted to lose him?

  “Did you know she might react this way?” I asked.

  A mockingbird in a nearby pine began and ended a complicated aria before she turned to me. “I’m afraid we did. She tried to persuade us to give you up. She made threats. She was still very young—”

  “Stop making excuses for her!”